练习题（1）
Part I Vocabulary
Directions: Complete the following ntences with the best words given in the brackets. (8%)
1. Our dreams will sometimes be ______ and our ethereal hopes blasted.
A. smashed B. shattered C. crushed D. crashed
2. I would e Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or ______ her lips into a very round O while saying, “Oh, my goodness.”
A. poking B. squaring C. pursing D. knitting
3. “By all means,” she urged, _____ her lashes eagerly.
A. clapping B. blinking C. batting D. knitting
4. After beating _____ odds to prove himlf a classroom genius, Steven has been cruelly snubbed by prospective employers.
A. credible B. incredible C. credulous D. incredulous
5. Be careful with that va - it's very_____.
A. cracked B. broken C. fragile D. crumbling
6. In a thousand years, archaeologists will be digging through the ______ of what was once San Francisco.
A. ruins B. wreckage C. rubble D. wreck
7. Figures produced at a World Energy Conference showed that oil and gas production should reach a ______ between 1985 and 2000.
A. peak B. apex C. summit D. high
8. Unfair criticism can ______ employees' lf-confidence.
A. spoil B. underlie C. ruin D. undermine
Directions: Complete the following ntences with the words or phras given below and change their forms if necessary. (17%)
befell | come up with | devoid | dire |
entranced | in the throes of | sulky | wiles |
| | | |
9. No one can deny that the Negro is in _____ need of this kind of legitimate power.
10. This had led Negro Americans in the past to ek their goals through power ______ of love and conscience.
11. She emed ______ by the music, a little frenzied piano piece with this mesmerizing quality.
12. I looked out over the audience, at my mother’s blank face, my father’s yawn, Waverly’s ______ expression.
13. Today we are ______ a worldwide reformation of cultures, a tectonic shift of habits and dreams.
14. It’s really hard to be original the days, so the easiest way to______ new stuff is to mix things that already exist.
15. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; u all the arts and ______ of our x.
16. I must tell you about a very strange experience that _____ me as a novelist.
heightened | luxuriant | multihued | penetrating |
plummeted | proliferation | poi | undoing |
unrelenting | | | |
| | | |
17. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, as preci as a chemist’s scales, as ______
as a scalpel.
18. She had an erectness of carriage, an ea of bearing, a _____ that clearly indicted the best of breeding.
19. In July the inland slope of the Rockies is ______ with flax and buckwheat, stonecrop and larkspur.
20. They never understood the grim, ______ advance of the US Cavalry.
21. … which assumes the public is thinking in red, white, and blue, when actually the spectrum of emotions, ideas, and opinions is, like America itlf, _______.
22. The nameless man and woman who _____, hand in hand, to their deaths from an upper floor of World Trade are caught in the mind’s eye of history.
23. There was a relaxing of the rampant materialism, which has been the _____ of community in this country.
24. Britain has been going through a period of what one might call _________ livestock incurity of late.
25. In the United States the great of local papers allows print journalism to provide the additional rvice of answering to local concerns.
Part II Cloze
Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word. Make sure that each word is ud in the right form. (15%)
The English language, one of the major languages of the world, is identified by linguists as a member of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. At the beginning of the 19th century, English was the (1)____________ speech of barely 15 million people. Today it is ud regularly by more than 320 million and is (2)____________ only to Chine, who world primacy in numbers of speakers is accounted (3)____________ largely by the vast population of China.
Of the 3,000 or (4)____________ languages spoken today, about half a dozen predominate, having among their speakers two thirds of the world’s population. English, one of tho influential and growing languages, is spoken in areas widely scattered over the globe. It is the native or (5)____________ language of one fifth of the earth’s land surface, being ud throughout most of the North (6)____________ continent and in the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, and the Republic of South Africa. Of the languages of colonization it has been the most important in Africa, Asia, and the islands of the central and southern Pacific.
At prent, English is the most widely studied language in areas (7)____________ it is not native. It is the chief foreign language (8)____________ in the schools of Latin American and European countries. In Japan, children begin the study of English in the venth grade, and in the Philippines all class are conducted in (9)____________ from the fourth grade on. In India, English is an official language alternative (10)____________ Hindi, the chief official language.
